His study of St. Augustine had put him in a position to recognise, on internal grounds, that a work, “On true and false penance,” generally attributed to this African Father, was not really his. He tells his friend that his opinion of the book had “given great offence to all”; though the insipid contents of the same were so far removed from the spirit of Augustine, yet it was esteemed because it had been quoted and employed by Gratian and Peter Lombard as one of Augustine’s works. That he had been aware of this and nevertheless had stood up for the truth, that was his crime, which had aroused the enmity particularly of Dr. Carlstadt; not, however, that he cared very much; both Lombard and Gratian had done much harm to consciences by means of this stupid book. His opinion regarding the spuriousness of the work was in the end generally accepted, even, for instance, by Bellarmine; Trithemius, moreover, had been of the same opinion before Luther’s time; in his attacks on its contents, however, Luther, led astray by his false ideas of penance, exceeded all bounds, and thus vexed, beyond measure, his colleagues who at that time still held the opposite view. According to this letter, he had also challenged all the critics of his new ideas in a disputation held by one of his pupils under his direction. “They barked and screeched at me on account of my lectures, but their mouths were to be stopped and the opinions of others heard.” It was a question of defending his erroneous doctrine, regarding the absolute helplessness of nature, which he had meantime formulated, and to which we shall return immediately. In consequence, he says, all the “Gabrielists” (i.e. followers of the scholastic Gabriel Biel) here, as well as in the Faculty at Erfurt, were nonplussed. But I know my Gabriel quite as well as his own wonderful, wonderstruck worshippers; “he writes well, but as soon as he touches on grace, charity, hope, and faith, then, like Scotus his leader, he treads in the footprints of Pelagius.” Luther was quite free to dissent from the view, even of so good a professor as Biel, in this question of grace and virtue, but, already at that time, he had denounced as Pelagian several doctrines of the Church. Among those who were angered was the theologian Nicholas von Amsdorf, who took his licentiate at the same time as Luther, and became later on his close friend. Amsdorf secretly sent one of Luther’s theses, of which he disapproved, to Erfurt, but afterwards allowed himself to be pacified. The humanistic tendency which was at that time beginning to make its way had, as we see from the letters, little part in the rise of the Lutheran movement at Wittenberg.